Rock docs to perform Saturday night at Southport Hall

All surgeons (one hopes, at least) have nimble fingers – all the better to slice you up and stitch you shut. But there’s one group of doctors that uses its dexterity with guitars and drums as well as scalpels and forceps, and they’ll be operating onstage in New Orleans this weekend.

N.E.D. ("No Evidence Of Disease") is six oncologists who play rock n'roll to raise funds for women's cancer research.

The rock band N.E.D. (which stands for “No Evidence of Disease,” the kind of notation you want to see on your chart), whose roster is made up of six gynecologic oncologists from all over the U.S., performs Saturday night, January 14, at the New Southport Hall. Procceds from the show will benefit the national Foundation for Women’s Cancer, as well as the Tulane Cancer Center’s Gynecologic Cancer Research Fund and HPV vaccine program. With such performances, as well as sales from the band’s releases on the Motema Music label, N.E.D. has raised between $75,000 and $100,000 for cancer research since forming in 2008, estimates Dr. William “Rusty” Robinson, who is a professor of gynecologic oncology at Tulane University’s School of Medicine when not playing bass and harmonica for N.E.D.

Besides raising cash for cancer research, N.E.D.’s intent is also to promote awareness. “Breast cancer, for example, gets so much publicity, and gynecologic cancers tend to take a backseat,” Robinson said. “Sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle that there are women with other kinds of cancers that are peculiar to women, that suffer just as much as women with breast cancer. So that’s kind of our mission.”

The band was formed on the fly, at the 2008 meeting of the Society for Gynecologic Oncology.

“The programming committee decided they wanted to have the membership provide the entertainment,” Robinson said. “They already knew about us, kind of through talk at cocktail parties: ‘What do you do for fun?’ ‘Oh, I play the guitar.’”

So the future members of the band threw together a set of a few dozen cover songs, and N.E.D. was born. It went over so well, Robinson said, that the band of M.D.’s began fielding requests from other medical societies asking them to play other conferences. Soon, they began adding original songs to the set list.

Musically, N.E.D.’s sound channels weighty late grunge – lead vocalist Dr. John Boggess of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine is a pioneer in the field of robotic surgery in gynecologic oncology, and also, audibly, something of an Eddie Vedder acolyte. All of the members contribute to songwriting, though, Robinson says, by emailing each other tracks, and rehearsing and adding new parts digitally. Though the six doctors live and practice in separate cities – from New York to Alaska – they’ve managed to put out two albums and play between 10 and 15 benefit shows a year.

Though N.E.D. is a break from its members’ lives as medical professionals, themes and topics from their day jobs do pop up in their songs. One track on “Six Degrees,” the band’s latest, was inspired by a patient of Robinson’s whose chemotherapy sessions got a bit rowdy.

“The song’s called ‘Don’t Start The Party’,” Robinson explained. A patient of his with ovarian cancer, he said, bonded so well with the other women receiving chemotherapy at the same time that hospital staff had to ask the group to keep the noise level down, when they talked and joked in the treatment room.

“The charge nurse had to go down and separate them, just like kids in school,” he said. That day, as one woman was leaving, she told her friends, “Okay, don’t start the party til I get back next time,” Robinson said. The incident and the line became the chorus of the song.

Songs like those, and the band itself, bring an element of humanity and even fun to the often impersonal and frightening arena of hospitals and disease – for the fans and patients, but for the doctors too.

“It’s quite a departure from what all of us normally do, so we get a big kick out of it,” Robinson said. “It’s therapeutic.”

N.E.D.

WHAT: Six gynecologic oncologists play rock n’roll to raise funds and awareness for women's cancers.

WHERE: Southport Hall, 200 Monticello Ave., 835-2903

WHEN: Saturday, 7 p.m.

TICKETS: $25 general admission; $50 for a V.I.P ticket that includes an after-party with the band.